Bird Tapper vs the Krampus Fellowship Clan. Boy am I glad to finally be finished with this one!

Since this game is essentially just new levels for Bird Tapper Purple Platoon Panic, I’ll refer you over to BobbyBurt’s design retrospective for that game if you wanna know how the core gameplay came to be.

Essentially, the whole idea to expand on Purple Platoon Panic started out before the release of that game when I was sending out pre-release builds to some game developer friends, which many of them enjoyed. A few even asked me if they could do levels for it, which led me to think about expanding off the base game with a small collection of new levels.

During development of the original Purple Platoon Panic, we discussed the idea of doing bonus chapters, but we could never quite come up with a satisfying way to do it that’d be visually distinct enough. The original idea was to have a few super tough levels that swapped your sprite with a guy wearing a bird tapper mascot face (the achievement icon for “Jailbroken” is the only remnant of this), but we could never agree on how the tiles or backgrounds would look for these levels. I decided to bring back that core idea, but to give it more purpose.

If you've played Bit.Trip Runner at all, I wanted to go for a similar vibe of significantly changing up the visuals, but our own aesthetic was proving a bit more limiting that I would have liked. In the end, it came down to keeping Bird Tapper's simplistic artstyle or making interesting bonus stages that most players would never encounter. You can probably guess what we went with, but I think it was the right move in the end.

We eventually settled on just doing cameos from other games: it’s admittedly a bit lazy, but since it’s mostly obscure characters by friends, I feel like it isn't as circlejerk-y as it tends to come across as most of the time (the only one I feel kinda delves into more clout chaser-y territory is The Kid, but I feel like we went in a more unique direction with it so I guess it's fine).

I wanted to do something a bit different from how these sorts of things usually work: where they’re either glorified palette swaps of the basic protagonist, or better versions of him, so we decided these new characters would work more as “challenge runs”: Puck is about timing, Gappy is about speed, and The Kid is about precision. I was sort of on a kick of watching a bunch of GBA game challenge runs, so I think that may have influenced the direction of it a lot haha.

There were a few scrapped characters for the game, so allow me to discuss them!

Stardrop from Stardrop Sprint / Indie Pogo: you would have been able to charge up punches, which would influence their speed and length. We eventually decided to cut back to only 3 characters, so he got cut.

Terry from Bat-Terry Assault: since Bat-Terry Assault informed some aspects of Bird Tapper's moveset, I wanted to add him in as sort of a tribute to the roots of this game. Problem was, I couldn't figure out a way to make him feel unique.

Pico from Pico's School: absolutely my most clout-chaser-ish choice, he was eliminated very quickly because I wanted all the characters to have multiple jumps in their source material: that way it wouldn't be too weird to see them hoping around with the same basic properties as Bird Tapper. Pico is unable to jump at all in his own games, plus I wanted to avoid the general stigma of this just being a "Newgrounds Game".

Adaran from Adaran: back when I was thinking about this more ambitiously, I wanted to include projectile-wielding characters. Adaran would have run faster, and could throw out his boomerang shuriken.

Deathninja from Shogun Triad Deathninja: The most aimless of the characters I considered, Deathninja was basically the prototype for Puck: he had a better punch and uppercut, but was slower.

Mumba from Ugby Mumba: This one was another character that got axed when Bobby decided we shouldn't have projectile characters. Mumba had a mechanic which would have allowed him to shoot a gun rather than punch, which would cause recoil. The Kid also used to have this mechanic (minus the recoil).

In the end, we decided to cut down massively because the quantity of levels we got just wasn't enough to do more than 3 characters. When we ended up with 3 characters, I felt like we needed to do something a bit more to make it worth the player's while: leading to the addition of alternate costumes and the new music tracks.

In terms of inspirations for this game, I mentioned a few of the games that directly influenced PPP in the interview we did for Salt n Spam, so check that out if you’re interested!

In terms of Krampus Fellowship Clan specifically, the action platformer Nikujin was a huge influence on the tileset, which I think is kinda obvious when you look at it long enough haha. There's a somewhat subtle LISA: The Painful homage in the tileset too, I think hardcore fans like me will find it pretty quickly though.

Thanks again for all the support over the years, and expect some more teases for my new game Invasion of the Croak Crusader sometime soon!